1:22 a.m. - 2002-09-12
Remembering
Early in August over a year ago I was corresponding with one of my internet friends - an e-mail pen pal. I had asked for some information about the Kennedy presidency because I felt the sources available to me were too biased and my memories of the events of that time were those of a small child who didn't have enough information to put things into a reasonable context. What triggered the exchange was the movies that had just come out about the invasion of the Bay of Pigs and the assassination of the President. I asked Bubba "why these movies now?"
When events unfolded on September 11, I felt I had my answer. You see, often the movie industry seems to intuit what is coming to be in their choice of subject matter. I felt very uneasy when I saw the cluster of movies about the events occurring in the early 1960's.
When John Kennedy was murdered the world seemed to reel with the shock of it. I'm certain every person alive at that time remembers exactly what they were doing when they heard the news. I know I do. I was in elementary school and the announcement was made over the PA. Our Principal was a World War II vet, who'd lost an arm in service to our country, and he was one tough dude. It sounded like he was trying not to cry.
As a small child the whole thing seemed incomprehensible to me. I remember grieving for the Kennedy children because they had lost their Dad. But I also remember feeling a tremendous fear. It was the height of the Cold War and there were drills at school about nuclear explosions and there were air raid sirens that would occasionally go off as part of the testing for the emergency warning system. I knew that my parents thought very highly of Mr Kennedy's choices in foreign policy and I had watched when Nikita Khruschev had slammed his shoe on the desk at the UN during the Cuban missile crisis - hearing his threats. When I watched those movies last summer with my sons, all of the confusion and fear I had felt came back to me. I tried to explain how it felt to be told that a nuclear war could be imminent at the slip of a policy directive gone wrong. They had trouble understanding. On September 11 they learned what I meant.
But I also remember the words that were used in 1963 - "the act of a mad man" and mutters about power barons who felt somehow that Mr Kennedy was getting in their way of controlling the world. They wanted to escalate the tensions. All those accused were Americans who had benefitted from the choices of the day, yet they struck out at that very blessing in the form of the Head of State chosen by their own countrymen.
A "hot war" was averted because it became the determination of the Western World not to succumb to the provocation of such a terrible act of violence that had the intent of escalating the international tensions. There is a tremendous profit in war for those willing to exploit it. Ask IBM about World War II.
The act of terror and the players were different on September 11 but the intent is still the same. No one ever mentioned punishing all Texans for something that occurred in their state, everyone realized it was not the choice of that state's citizens - that they were the vehicle used but not the source. In fact it was a Texan, Mr. Johnson, who stepped into the vacuum left by Mr Kennedy's death and who led the Western World out of its peril. It took a while longer for the Berlin Wall - the Iron Curtain - to finally fall and for the Soviet Union to lose its position of pre-eminence, partly because of the seeds of the actions that began at the death of Mr Kennedy. There was a deep and abiding anger over the murder of an American President but there was also an unspoken pact not to let the provocateurs have their way.
Now, of course, those are the observations I made as a child and my understanding was limited, but I wonder if there isn't a lesson and a pathway left there for us to follow now.
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